ABSTRACT
The increasing pressure of climate change has inspired two normative agendas; socio-technical transitions and socio-ecological resilience, both sharing a complex-systems epistemology. Socio-technical solutions include a continuous, massive data gathering exercise is now underway in urban places under the guise of developing a ‘smart’(er) city. This has led to the creation of data-rich environments where large datasets data has become central to monitoring and responding to found anomalies. Some have argued that these kinds of datasets can help in planning for resilient cities. In this chapter however, we focus on a more nuanced, ecologically based, socio-environmental perspective of resilience planning that is often given less consideration. Here, we broadly discuss the tightly linked, mutually influenced, social and biophysical subsystems that are critical for understanding urban resilience. We argue for the need to incorporate these sub system linkages into the smart city lexicon. We make our case by drawing on our experiences developing and deploying the Landuse Evolution and Impact Assessment Model (LEAM) in Stockholm Sweden. We show how the Stockholm LEAM planning support system (PSS) can bridge the divide between technological and socio-environmental systems. We use the PSS to analyze the connection between urban land use transformation (social) and water (environmental) systems within the context of planning for a more resilient Stockholm.
